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beets

The ‘secret’ to this salad is lightly roasting the vegetables; they are cooked just long enough to increase their natural sweetness yet not long enough to soften to mush. The veg is still firm (especially when chilled) but has a near-noodle quality when served.

This salad is fairly acidic (it uses balsamic and lemon) and you may wish to lower the amount of acid that you use; but I wouldn’t! Vinegar and beets are a natural combination (i.e. pickled beets) and this salad exploits their relationship. The addition of lemon makes it light and spring-like yet the amount of root vegetables also makes this a salad you could eat as a meal.

If there is a brighter natural food on the face of this earth, I don’t know what it is!

Beet hummus is made without chickpeas (at least that’s the case in our house!). It has it’s own unique flavor but the addition of cumin, tahini, lemon and olive oil make this taste a lot like traditional hummus. It can be eaten in the exact same way and is a great addition to lunch or dinner.

Fall is a bit of a shoulder season when it comes to our kitchen; the changing weather beckons for soup one day and something lighter the next. A steady stream of greens (some from greenhouses and some of the heartier greens that are still being harvested from the field) make salad a natural choice but other ingredients are scarce.

I love to make a lettuce and beet salad for lunch on the weekend. I sometimes make it with bacon (like in this recipe) but you can skip that if that’s not your cup of lard!

These quick pickled beets are similar to our recipe on quick pickled carrots (fermented) earlier in the week though the technique is a little different. They were very tasty but I’d use purple beets (assuming I had them) next time in order to avoid the darkening you see near the bottom of the jar in the photo below.